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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 23
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      Next pandemic live read. The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steilhttps://www.amazon.com/Marshall-Plan-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/1501102370 …

      9 replies 36 retweets 301 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 23
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      Story starts with FDR’s vision for One World post WW2 dying with him, and Stalin playing along with new orgs like the IMF and UN to ensure they’d be set up not to interfere with USSR. He hopes to dominate a weak postwar Western Europe. But Truman has other plans.

      1 reply 1 retweet 21 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 23
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      George Marshall as Secretary of State leads the plan. Stalin hates it because he can’t veto it and it aims to create a strong Western Europe. Stage is set.

      1 reply 1 retweet 22 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 23
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      “...given the enduring passion for creating “new Marshall Plsns” to solve the worlds problems, the story of the old, original one is,I believe, well worth telling.” Amen. Let’s go.

      1 reply 1 retweet 34 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 23
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

      I feel seen.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1244111892265570304?s=21 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      New thought is to maybe track this with sort of a recovery ooda loop focused mainly on rapidly identifying and imitating successful local recovery patterns. An integral (as in calculus) OODA loop that accumulates rebuild patterns. A pattern inventory. Bottom-up DIY Marshall plan.
      Show this thread
      11:15 PM - 23 Jul 2020
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      • Avoseh Mauton Timoth Kerry Phil Based Prophet of the Lethe River The Habit Guy Colin Curtin 🇺🇲🏳️‍🌈🌲🌍 Claudius Link Brie Code 🐍🌵 🕶
      1 reply 1 retweet 22 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 25
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          This book feels contemporary in a way pre-WW2 books don’t. Discussion of how Stalin reneged on promises at Yalta, pissing off FDR and then Truman.

          1 reply 1 retweet 26 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 25
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          Wow. For every dead American in WW2, 13 Germans died and 70 Russians.

          3 replies 10 retweets 58 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 25
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          Apparently Marshall Plan was the alt to the plan Stalin wanted and FDR was willing to accept, the Morganthau plan, to leave Germany de-industrialized and pastoralized. The decision to rebuild a strong Germany messed up Stalin’s plans and started Cold War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan …

          3 replies 4 retweets 41 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 26
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          Off on bunny trail to refresh memory about Bretton Woods, which created the Marshall Plan OS of IMF, IDRB, dollar-and-gold standard, etc. Somehow I’d forgotten that this happened while WW2 was still on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system …

          1 reply 0 retweets 28 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 26
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          Soviets say no to Bretton Woods, leading to 3 inaugural markers of Cold War: Stalin address at Bolshoi theater on Feb 9, 1946, George Kennan long telegram 2 weeks later, Churchill Iron Curtain speech s2 weeks after that.

          1 reply 1 retweet 25 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 26
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          The OS is not enough since it is predicated on political stability, so Truman admin kinda sidelines it to do a much more proactive Western Europe rebuilding predicated on a Cold War with Soviet Union. So Marshall Plan is the big initial strategic piece of the Truman doctrine.

          1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 26
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          Funny how this does not feel like history but living reality. Partly because I was alive and old enough to pay attention for the end of the Cold War, and partly because consequences are still unfolding.

          4 replies 1 retweet 35 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 31
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          Didn’t realize the extent of postwar civil conflict in Europe after 1945. 100s of thousands killed in reprisal for collaboration, lots of political purging. Big population movements especially German minorities. Coming on the heels of 35m civilian dead it must have seemed small

          4 replies 4 retweets 38 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 31
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          There’s a blind spot in my sense of this history between the end of the war and true Cold War events like the Berlin airlift. The 3 years 1945-48 must have been crazy.

          4 replies 1 retweet 39 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 31
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          “All told, Stalin and Hitler forcibly displaced some 30m people between 1941-43” ... and vast numbers “sent home” to horrible fates after the war. 40% of German housing destroyed. This was one huge messy cleanup job. We rarely hear about the postwar era.

          3 replies 3 retweets 31 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 31
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          People had learned during the war that patriotic duty meant lying, cheating, and black marketeering during the war so couldn’t get back to lawful behavior after easily. Not that they could, since the economy was a shambles. By inflation etc.

          1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 31
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          Dean Acheson and George Kennan both saw it all coming as the war would down. Without a serious rebuilding by America, Europe would have turned into a long-term disaster area. World War 3 would have started from the nascent continental civil war.

          1 reply 2 retweets 24 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 31
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          Gotta admire the American idealism that drove a rebuilding in the face of Stalin’s desire to keep the region weak, basically accepting the war effects as a strategic gift. Gotta remember: “don’t rebuild” is always a major viewpoint after every tragic disaster. Including Covid.

          1 reply 5 retweets 71 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 4
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          Interesting. Apparently Truman loved maps and frequented the map room at the White House (paper and pins era... I imagine it was large screen monitors by Obama time and is now sold to Kodak for $3.50) He apparently had autodidact mastery of the maps and history.

          1 reply 0 retweets 28 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 4
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          1947. Britain retreating from Empire and abandoning obligations to Turkey and Greece provokes Stalin ambitions for expansion. The US scrambled into a response. Truman is a map hawk. Kennan is a grand strategy guy. Dean Acheson seems like an operator. What will they do?

          1 reply 1 retweet 20 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 4
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          Already a big learning just 3% into book. The Marshall plan was about containing Stalin first, filling vacuum of retreating Britain second. Altruistic-idealist reconstruction of Europe was a distant third reason. I thought it was the first.

          2 replies 5 retweets 48 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 4
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          Acheson thought Stalin would take over Greece and Turkey to cut off East from West, then advance into Asia to take over India and then China. Surreal how much colonial spheres were still seen as NPCs rather than agents. Not wrong. It took another 30 years for them to agentify.

          1 reply 1 retweet 29 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 4
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          FDR treasury apparently put a lot of pressure on Britain to unravel its empire financially (through Bretton Woods I guess) while supporting it in WW2. I guess he was indirectly a factor in decolonization 🤔

          3 replies 1 retweet 28 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 5
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          Kennan was a Russophile but hated soviet leadership. Melancholic intellectual who preferred Russian culture. His boss Ambassador Harriman thought he understood Russia but not the US.

          1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 5
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          Heh Kennan effectively memed the US into the Cold War with the Long Telegram, the first viral documented blog post in history

          2 replies 0 retweets 30 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 6
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          Interesting. The US awakened into awareness of itself as a political superpower relatively late but quickly over just about 15 weeks in early 1947 when both the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan came together, precipitated by the Greece/Turkey crisis caused by British withdrawal.

          1 reply 2 retweets 23 likes
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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 6
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          Britain went bankrupt as an empire really quickly in 1947 via financial crisis, and the US got sucked into the power vacuum. I’d like to read the view of this period from the Kremlin perspective. Wtf were they thinking. Did Kennan read them right?

          2 replies 2 retweets 40 likes
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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 6
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          “FDR had been too forthright in highlighting the evils of empire for his accidental successor to appear to be creating one” So Truman speech to Congress kinda finessed an empire into existence.

          2 replies 0 retweets 25 likes
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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 10
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          Fascinating. Marshall plan and NATO in part grew out of a sense that the UNRRA which existed 1943-47 was being used by hostile countries to take advantage of the US which provided the bulk of the funding. Ironic given similar charges by Trump against NATO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Relief_and_Rehabilitation_Administration …

          1 reply 2 retweets 20 likes
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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 10
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          ‘In dealing with Congress, in Acheson’s view it was sometimes necessary to make arguments “clearer than the truth”’ 😂 OG alt facts?

          4 replies 0 retweets 23 likes
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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 10
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          “Cartohypnosis” apparently shaped mid-century geopolitics. Guy named Halford Mackinder was apparently considered father of geopolitics and suffered from cartohypnosis as did apparently everybody back then. The falling dominoes type metaphor started then. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halford_Mackinder …

          1 reply 1 retweet 15 likes
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        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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          Hmm. Both the pro-Soviet left and isolationist right favored acting through the UN over Truman’s direct intervention approach to Greece and Turkey.

          2 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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        29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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          The US made the mistake of “conflating an ally’s failings (Britain’s) with an opponent’s strategy.” Stalin did not care about Greece and Turkey and was focused on Germany. He in fact stuck to 1944 spheres of influence agreements with Churchill.

          2 replies 0 retweets 18 likes
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        30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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          New character enters story: William Lockhart Clayton. UN skeptic and firmly anti-Soviet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Clayton …

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        31. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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          Clayton was Southern businessman/free trader “King Cotton” turned political appointee running war stuff under FDR and Truman who wrote influential memo arguing that UN and IBRD wouldn’t work, and aid had to be linked to political reforms favoring US.

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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